Jeremy Hopkins says: "He's someone who emphatically ticks all the boxes - extremely highly-rated academically by silks & judges, as well as being conscientious, down to earth, client focused and extremely pleasant to deal with. In short, someone who is loved by both QCs and clerks, quite a rare combination!"

With the list price of a new Airbus A380 currently nearly $390m, aircraft leases are worth a lot of money - and so is the litigation arising from them. Bajul Shah of XXIV Old Buildings has numerous leasing disputes on his CV, but the case he cites as particularly interesting is the "very unusual" Blue Sky One Ltd & Ors v Blue Airways, which concerned three Boeing 747s acquired by a British company to provide capacity to an Iranian airline in a "complicated structure" that was believed to avoid falling foul of US sanctions against Iran.

"The Iranian airline basically just took the aircraft," says Shah. "What started as a claim for delivery up of the aircraft became a much, much bigger dispute. Two of the aircraft had been mortgaged to an American company, which then joined in the litigation. It turned into a very, very heavyweight commercial dispute.... Everyone got permission to appeal to Court of Appeal on various points, but it eventually settled. That was a very enjoyable bit of litigation simply because we were examining some very unusual facts. We were working with very intelligent clients."

Aviation is "only one of the many things I do", Shah says. "I do a lot of general commercial litigation, so that includes general contractual disputes, banking disputes, some shareholder disputes. Anything that has a business side to it. I also do a fair amount of trusts litigation and insolvency-related work." Last month, this took him to Cap Juluca, a luxury Anguilla resort whose operator recently went into liquidation. "I was acting for the liquidators. Various warring factions were trying to get control of this resort. One of the things the liquidators were trying to do was to sell it to the highest bidder." In an earlier case in the Caribbean, he was called on when the court needed an amicus to put forward contrary argument as to why a compromise agreement should not receive the judges' blessing.

His stint in Anguilla was "hard work", Shah says. He was usually up at 4.30am, spent several hours in court and then worked in the evenings. "It can become a bit difficult - I've got a young family, and my children are almost three and four and a half. In recent years I've been doing a lot more work in Guernsey so it's more manageable."

"After the dust had settled, Equatorial Guinea embarked on two pieces of litigation." One was for a Norwich Pharmacal order seeking disclosure of documents that Mann had lodged with a bank. "That legal action went all the way up to the Privy Council and they allowed it." The second was the claim brought for damages against the conspirators, including "a bizarre claim by the president for assault because he feared for his life." Shah's team argued that these were political claims and therefore not justiciable in England's courts. The argument was rejected by the high court but accepted by the Court of Appeal. "We said, how on earth is an English court supposed to adjudicate on, for example, claims for damages for supposed 'economic chaos' resulting from increased security measures imposed by the government after the attempted coup? Because essentially that was what Equatorial Guinea were asking the court to do." As more and more Russian oligarchs end up taking their disputes to London, he says, these arguments have been run again. Where an individual is alleged to have simply siphoned off money, the cases are generally heard; where there is a political element to a case, counsel are quick to point to arguments about justiciability.

How does he celebrate winning a case? "I don't think there is one way, actually. Sometimes it's a nice touch for the whole team to go out to dinner. A lot of my cases are quite long and take up a lot of your time." He's not tempted to use the air miles? "No … More taking time off with family."